e latter
formally permits, he furnishes them with the very weapon of gang
organization which they afterward turn against him to his hurt.

And yet this boy who, when taken from his alley into the country for the
first time, cries out in delight, "How blue the sky and what a lot of it
there is!"--not much of it at home in his barrack--has in the very love of
dramatic display that sends him forth to beat a policeman with his own
club or die in the attempt, in the intense vanity that is only a
perverted form of pride, capable of any achievement, a handle by which he
may be most easily grasped and led. It cannot be done by gorging him _en
masse_ with apples and gingerbread at a Christmas party.[7] It can be done
only by individual effort, and by the influence of personal character in
direct contact with the child--the great secret of success in all dealings
with the poor. Foul as the gutter he comes from, he is open to the
reproach of "bad form" as few of his betters. Greater even than his desire
eventually to "down" a policeman, is his ambition to be a "gentleman," as
his sister's to be a "lady." The street is responsible for the caricature
either makes of the character. On a play-bill I saw in an East Side
street, only the other day, this _repertoire_ set down: "Thursday--The
Bowery Tramp; Friday--The Thief." It was a theatre I knew newsboys, and
the other children of the street who were earning money, to frequent in
shoals. The play-bill suggested the sort of training they received there.

I wish I might tell the story of some of these very lads whom certain
enthusiastic friends of mine tried to reclaim on a plan of their own, in
which the gang became a club and its members "Knights," who made and
executed their own laws; but I am under heavy bonds of promises made to
keep the peace on this point. The fact is, I tried it once, and my
well-meant effort made no end of trouble. I had failed to appreciate the
stride of civilization that under my friends' banner marched about the
East Side with seven-league boots. They read the magazines down there and
objected, rather illogically, to being "shown up." The incident was a
striking revelation of the wide gap between the conditions that prevail
abroad and those that confront us. Fancy the _Westminster Review_ or the
_Nineteenth Century_ breeding contention among the denizens of East London
by any criticism of their ways? Yet even from Hell's Kitchen had I not
long before been dr